Columbus Day

It started out as one fine autumn day here today, Columbus Day 2014.  There was blue sky, and balmy temperatures, a stiff breeze and lots of color from changing leaves.  It was beautiful.  The weather deteriorated over the course of the day and by evening it was spitting rain, but for most of the day, it was perfect.

I have the house decorated for Halloween.  I love Halloween!  I loved it as a child and I love it now.  And it's not just the idea of candy, it's the spookiness and all the black,  the witches, spiders, pumpkins, ghosts and skeletons.

witch on the front door

I have started a collection of glass pumpkins.  I like that I can use them through Thanksgiving and they are cute and pretty easy to store.

I also seem to be collecting spiders.  There are spiders galore outdoors, all over my yard, in fact, but the ones I am actively collecting are faux.  I do not encourage real spiders to reside in the house.  

The merchants in town seem to all be sporting scarecrows outside their establishments.  Here are three that I collected snapshots of this morning.  They are all pretty cute, I have to say.

I am taking beginning (and I do mean beginning!) Spanish at Edmonds Community College.  I studied German and French in school, all those many decades ago, and while Spanish is similar to French, my old brain is finding this pretty heavy going.  Tonight we started having to conjugate verbs, something I have been dreading since the classes began four weeks ago.  (We only meet once a week....)

I am really trying.  I am terrible.  The will is there but the brain is feeble.  And we won't even begin to talk about how uncooperative my tongue can be!